My interest in the subject of this book – the social exclusion of refugees and asylum seekers – has developed over many years. During the 1990s, working as a practitioner within refugee camps in South East Asia, I became aware of how Burmese, Khmer, Laotian and Vietnamese refugees were subjected to policies by host governments that did not match with their experiences or meet their needs. I saw firsthand how the so-called ‘humane deterrence’ policies that emerged during the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese refugees involved making Vietnamese refugees move their personal belongings from their temporary accommodation to different accommodation every few weeks. These policies also prescribed how hilltribe refugees from Laos were contained within camps over decades, pending some form of ‘durable solution’; how Khmer refugees lived in insecure camps close to the border, one of which gained the honour of housing the largest population in South East Asia with no electricity; and how Burmese refugees were controlled at the mercy of border guards who oversaw whole camps being relocated at short notice, maintained strict control and sometimes forcibly repatriated populations of these camps to Burma into the hands of one of the cruellest military regimes and abusers of human rights the contemporary world knows. Thus, after escaping persecution in countries of origin, human rights abuses against refugees continued to occur over long periods of time.

Returning to the United Kingdom (UK) from the Thailand–Burma border in 2000, I found that the asylum system was itself in flux, with a new Asylum and Immigration Act that set up a system wherein asylum seekers were dispersed across the country. Asylum seekers fleeing persecution were also subject to a raft of other policy mechanisms designed to deter their entry, including deportation, detention and destitution. Dispersal, pending the outcome of a refugee status determination process, was not receiving the same attention from refugee advocates as the more urgent and pressing needs of campaigning against deportations, getting adults and children out of detention centres or supporting people who had not been granted any legal status to remain in the UK. At the same time, media reports of fatalities, hostility and racism were emanating rapidly from dispersal cities. Asylum seekers were being moved around the country while waiting for decisions that would affect the rest of their lives.